Monday, August 06, 2007

How to Handle Bad Press

Well, I have to give WebLoyalty.com credit: They, unlike some very un-Internet-savvy companies, know how to handle bad blog reviews. After I wrote a negative post about them a couple of weeks ago to warn you, the company found my blog post and sent me a lengthy email in response:
Webloyalty.com protects its reputation and monitors the blogosphere to insure information posted on our company is truthful and accurate. Through this monitoring, we found your blog comments posted about your husband's Reservation Rewards membership.

...At this time, we'd like to address your concerns by giving you some information on how the membership was initiated. Our records show that on May 16, 2007, when Steve completed an online transaction at www.Expedia.com he enrolled in Reservation Rewards by clicking on a $10 cash back award... I've enclosed the actual page through which he joined. Please note that directly above the section for entering email addresses, the text advises that you are authorizing the secure transfer of your name, address and credit or debit card information to Reservation Rewards for billing and benefit processing.

Immediately after accepting the membership offer Steve was presented with a membership acknowledgement page and within 10 minutes a membership confirmation email with details on how to use the membership was sent to his email address. These are also attached for you and Steve to review. We sent five
more emails to Steve’s email address from May 17 through June 15, 2007...

I hope this helps to clarify how the Reservation Rewards membership was initiated and why Steve was charged the membership fee.

After looking at the documents they attached and talking with Steve, I still felt kind of baffled...I just have a hard time believing he really would have intentionally signed up for something like that, knowing it was a monthly charge. It's not that he doesn't make mistakes--but I'm definitely the one in our family who signs up for "free trial" deals (and occasionally gets burned by them). Not him.

At any rate, the whole situation was resolved very easily and quickly (Steve's corporate credit card was immediately refunded when he disputed the charge), and I do have to give the company credit for their web presence and the way they handled this. It was only fair for me to update my blog accordingly--so here you go.

Moral of the story: Always read the fine print. And monitor your junk/spam email folder--you never know what important things might be going in there!

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